Sneak And Rescue. Shirl Henke

Tiff said cheerfully.

      “Young lady! I won’t have such language,” Jenny replied with a genuine bite in her voice. “You apologize to Mrs. Granger at once.”

      To Sam’s surprise, the girl meekly bowed what looked to be the top end of her “dribble” and said contritely, “I apologize for using a bad word.”

      Now wasn’t the time to explain that she hadn’t changed her name when she married Matthew Granger. “Apology accepted,” she said with a grin.

      “Tiff’s being good because Mommy says she won’t take us on the Questar battle simulation day after tomorrow if we don’t behave,” Mellie piped up.

      That explained it, sort of. Whatever a Questar was.

      Ida Kleb was a wiry little woman with a bulldog’s face and gorilla-size hands that looked capable of snapping the neck of anyone who crossed her. She wore a perpetual scowl and her gray eyes cut like lasers. No one in the IRS messed with her. Matt wasn’t about to break that rule. He stood in the door of her cramped little office, looking from Kleb to her austere surroundings. All the papers in the room were lined up with razor-edged neatness as if even inanimate objects understood her demands.

      “You, again, Mr. Granger. I’ve already told you, our investigation of Dr. Reicht is confidential. Go find something else to write about for the Herald.”

      “I’m not here on a story. I thought maybe you and I could have an exchange of information about the good doc.” Her eyes narrowed to tiny slits, seeming to move as if she were a Cylon Centurion from the original television series Battlestar Galactica. Matt smiled inwardly. Guess Sam was right. I’m still a geek.

      “Any information you possess about Dr. Reicht you are obligated to give the Internal Revenue Service.” Kleb stared up at him as she walked around the desk. Despite the disparity in their heights, she was utterly undaunted.

      He couldn’t help looking down at the rounded toes of her sensible shoes, wondering about a poison dagger for an instant before he replied, “Whatever happened to First Amendment rights for the press?”

      “Nowadays, it doesn’t have any,” she shot back, standing almost toe-to-toe with him.

      He refused to back away, but he did raise his hands in mock surrender. “Look, I just want to help. He’s involved in a case my wife’s working on and I’m looking out for her safety. I found out a few things that might help your investigation…if you help me, it might protect Sam.”

      “You go first,” she said.

      “You play chess?”

      She turned and shuffled a stack of papers, straightening them even though they didn’t need it. “I don’t have time for hobbies, Mr. Granger.” Then, crossing her arms, she placed her big hands around her elbows and waited him out.

      “Could I at least sit down?” he asked, eyeing a battered chair in front of her desk. Ida nodded and returned to her own counterpart behind it. Matt was stalling, figuring the odds of getting anything useful out of this cagey dame. Might as well go for it. “I did a little digging through a source with ties to the drug scene.” She might buy it since he’d done a big exposé on Russian and Colombian mobsters last year.

      “Go on,” she prompted, tapping a sharpened pencil impatiently on a blotter.

      “The doc’s been a naughty boy. He couldn’t disclose all of his income the last couple of years because it’s drug related. He’s got a lot of very rich patients with expensive recreational habits—illegal recreational habits.” He watched her for a reaction. The best she gave was one minute twitch of an eyebrow.

      She tossed the pencil across the desk to cover it up. “We knew that, of course. You’re wasting my time.”

      “I don’t think you did.”

      “Give me the names of these patients.”

      “Tell me what tipped you to go after him first,” he countered.

      After sleeping poorly on the Hide-A-Bed in the sitting room of Jenny’s suite, Sam had arisen with two kids jumping up and down, yelling at each other while their mother entered the room carrying the promised costume. Sam took the outfit and headed to the bathroom to change into it. When she walked out the door and looked into the full-length mirror across the room, she flinched. “I look like a hooker from South Beach,” she said, then could’ve bitten her tongue.

      “What’s a hooker, Mrs. Granger?” Mellie asked.

      “Sorry, you’d think I didn’t grow up in a house with six younger kids,” Sam said to Jenny, not about to admit that her street-tough south-Boston brothers knew a lot more than that when they were Mellie’s age.

      “A hooker is a bad lady,” Tiff explained, although from her expression, her mother and Sam figured she really wasn’t sure.

      “But Lt. O’Hara isn’t bad,” Mellie said.

      “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that this getup’s uncomfortable.” Sam tugged at the spandex miniskirt and tried to shift the plunging neckline of the uniform so it didn’t reveal quite so much of her “best assets,” as Matt liked to call them.

      “You can see why I decided the costume wasn’t for me,” Jenny said with a blush. “The skirt fit me like a girdle. I don’t know what I was thinking when that rental clerk talked me into it, but I still thought my sister was coming and Tess would look great in it—just like you do. Harriett Mudd’s pants and shirt worked a lot better for me.”

      “Well, at least I can move in it,” Sam conceded. The low boots that came with the outfit had small heels but not enough to bother her if she had to sprint after Farley. I’ll probably catch pneumonia in that air-conditioned hall. But with any luck, she could locate young Winchester and be back in her nurse’s scrubs, transporting her “patient” home by afternoon. All she had to do was give Jenny and her girls the slip.

      “How about room service for breakfast?” Jenny asked. The girls immediately chorused agreement.

      “Er, I don’t do breakfast. I’ll catch something later,” Sam said.

      “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Tiff parroted like the merit-badge-winning Girl Scout she was.

      “You’re right, kiddo, but if I’m gonna stay in this uniform, maybe I’d better skip it just this once. I’ll see you on the floor, okay?”

      She left as Tiff insisted she’d have waffles and Mellie demanded French toast. Their mother fecklessly insisted they have yogurt or eggs for protein. Sam knew Jenny’d lose. She always did.

      The outrageous Lt. O’Hara costume worked to her advantage. When she slithered up and leaned over the registration counter, the young clerk’s eyeballs bulged out of their sockets and his tongue practically lolled on his keyboard. After flashing Farley’s photo, she had her “cousin’s” suite number in a flash. But when she arrived at the room on the fourteenth floor, which was really the thirteenth, her luck ran in that direction. A maid was already busy making up the beds.

      Farley and Elvis had departed for an early start at the con. “What were they dressed like? Could you describe their outfits?” she asked the smiling young woman with the fresh-scrubbed face of a kid working her way through college.

      Cyndi, as her name tag identified her, rolled her eyes. “I loved Alien and Lord of the Rings, but these guys are way out there, if you know what I mean—oh, I didn’t intend any offense,” she hastily added, looking at Sam’s skimpy “uniform.” “Er, are they family?” she asked, dubious.

      Sam grinned. “Not a chance in hell. One’s a car thief, the other’s a druggie.”

      That alarming news oddly seemed to reassure Cyndi. Kid must really need this job bad.

      “Well, the shorter